There are two ways to watch Look Into my Eyes, documentarian Lana Wilson’s character study of five psychics in New York. One is to explore its group portrait in the coolly nonjudgmental fashion Wilson seems to intend. The other is to try to work out whether the psychics are delusional, con artists, or tragically and misguidedly trying to help people through trauma.
My inner skeptic is always going to be drawn to that second possibility, and if you too are watching in that manner then there’s plenty of evidence to be found of malfeasance. There’s one particularly egregious cold reading that would make the great debunker James Randi whistle and point at the screen in full Leonardo DiCaprio meme mode. But Wilson’s research process is closer to that of Charles Fort, the turn-of-the-century researcher into what he dubbed “damned” facts. Fort looked at data that was outside of the science of the time – everything from UFOs to spontaneous human combustion – and said that it was as worthy of research as any other field of study. Wilson takes that intellectual egalitarianism on board but tries to use that acceptance of the arcane to frame her portraits.
Yet Wilson’s approach becomes infuriating. Her willingness to be a distant observer was a strength of After Tiller, her 2013 documentary about life in a clinic that provides abortion. However, that gently uncritical viewpoint was one of the weaker aspects of her 2020 portrait of a pre-Eras Taylor Swift, Miss Americana. Here, she takes all the psychics at face value, and in an industry – and that’s exactly what it is – like this, that seems somewhat naïve. Mediums are inevitably performers, and the only psychic out of the five who isn’t an actor or scriptwriter admits that she always wanted to be an indie cinema darling.
Wilson’s conclusion seems to overwhelmingly be that this is all at worst harmless and potentially helpful. That would be a lot easier if you didn’t remember that this all comes with a price tag. Ah, but they’re helping, goes the counterargument. Well, if you think it’s hard getting insurance to cover your shrink, good luck not having to pay out of pocket for a psychic. Whenever Wilson’s camera is on these spiritualists, it’s easier to be engaged in the way that she wants – detached, compassionate, even a little sympathetic toward them. But when she pulls back from this coterie of very traditionally quirky New York characters, and instead puts them in a two-shot with their next customer, it’s harder to be forgiving. Sometimes, yes, it’s harmless, because is that nice lady really suffering if someone tells her why her cat randomly runs to the door? (Quick answer: It’s a cat.) But the opening moment hangs like a ghost over the entire affair – a medical professional who has never gotten over a tragic shooting death in her ER three decades earlier. That she has to go to some random Craigslist stranger with a crystal ball for solace and support should be an indictment of our very broken, isolated society.
Of course, each of the five psychics has their own sob story, the instigating incident that led them to discover their talents. Those revelations are arguably far more insightful than anything they’re telling their clients. “Sometimes healers need the most healing,” one of them says during arguably the film’s most honest moment. But the problem remains that too many psychics have made a lot of money from playing on people’s credulity. It’s hard not to feel that Look Into My Eyes would pierce the veil with greater insight if Wilson wasn’t so credulous about everyone’s good intentions.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.
